HEALTH A-Z & MARIJUANA NEWS

93% OF CALIFORNIA WEED TESTED OVER PESTICIDE LIMIT - 2018

while there probably is pesticides in your weed, it isn't likly to kill you, but until they test properly, best to you grow your own.

“Pretty much nobody in the industry is growing an organic product, in a survey by an industry insider of grows over 4,000 square feet, every single one used banned substances.”

MOTHER NATURE MY ASS

Mother nature is all you need to grow great weed. But California growers, despite their Eco-green label don't believe in organic weed, they believe in chemical strays. Right now, a study of about fifty suppliers revealed that 75% of cannabis concentrates and over 90% of weed on the shelves in California dispensaries fail the proposed testing regulations for pesticides and herbicides.

A hundred years ago, China had a population of nearly 500 million on a land mass the size of the USA. That is more people than present day Canada, US, Mexico and Canada combined. The Chinese had no tractors, no pesticides and no fertilizers, basically no electricity at all in the rural areas. Unless there was severe drought everybody ate, albeit, not every meal included steak and lobster.

Today, with every invention at hand, thousands or organic solutions at hand, knowledge of composting and fermentation, etc. up the ying-yang, American growers insist on spraying poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals on everything, including their pot. Gone are the hippies from the 1960's with their lovely notions about saving the planet.

"The love children grew up, got fat, lazy and complied with the system. Now, they're behind a lot of cannabis grow operations, with their loyalty being the mighty dollar not the customer. It's generally a candy coated sell out." - Johnny Rodriguez

California’s organics-loving, go-green mentality can be well meant, but functionally it's a farce, In this supposid hub of environmental process, the movement has been co opted with factory food, a synthetic environment, IPhones and cell towers blasting microwave radiation everywhere,plastics with phthalates in containers and kitchenware, BPA chemicals in cosmetics, soaps, foods GMO, toothpaste, the tap water, you name it..

"As a group, California is insane. While some like to think of the Golden State as a mecca of the organic movement, fitness, beauty and technological progress, the reality is that you're hard pressed to find a more dyfunctional, assbackward, pseudo-academic bunch." - Johnny Rod

Now the California Board of Medical Cannabis is in charge of regulating the industry to make it safe. Well, sorry to be cynical, but who are these people really, what acumen do they have, are they going to enforce regulations that are stealthy, in that they they advertise their mandate as making weed safe for consumption, while the reality is that they fully intend to allow the big chemical manufacturers products to be used massively, as seen in the factory food industry. We're talking Monsanto's roundup, or anything else in their chemical derivatives arcenal - biological warchest.

"They reminisce, listen to John Lennon's Imagine, and Give Peace a Chance in their off time to relax but during the day, they could be spraying your weed with Monsanto nightmare pesticides.. They sing the words, Imagine no possessions, no religion too, and for a moment they are in the moment, back in the free 60's, early 70's, like a fresh breeze off a country lake. Then it's time for them to go back to the so called real world and navigate their existence with 100% obedience and in compliance with "the man".. there is a special place in hell for these people, just down the hall from Judas." - Johnny Rodriguez

With that tried and true analysis of regulatory agency behavior, public opinion can sway those from the 1960's and 1970's ex hippy generations to actually comply to their off hours dreaming, you know, imagine a world without chemical sprays, imagine a world without compliant sycophants.

"What they do with regulations, is to make the simple complicated. While they spray massively many crops, out of the blue, the want to test for a chemical down to the parts per billion level, which requires a half million dollar machine and multi million dollar laboratory. What we need is affordable and practical. You want to look for actually toxic levels to the consumer, which is in the parts per million level." - California Grower (paraphrase)

"The trajectory with California Weed regulations, is that they are set to kill the small guy, which is \what the real intent of the bulk or US regulations these last fifty years. " - Johnny Rod

You can effectively police all growers by unannounced yearly random inspections. If there are any banned substances on site, your license is pulled, and maybe you go to jail. Also, a state lab, equipped with half a dozen LMMS instruments, mold and fungus testing, cannabinoid profile analysis would cost but $10 million. This facility could be financed with what? two days in cannabis tax revenues. Such a facility could screen fifty grow operations in a day or two, down to parts per billion, and produce rock solid cannabinoid and terpene profiles. This kind of participation ty the Cannabis regulatory body would be a god send .... and would be very cost effective for the industry.

"They could make the rules simple and sensible, or expensive and complicated. bet on the latter." - Johnny Rod

Pesticides unfortunately have become an integral part of both the indoor and outdoor agricultural industry, thanks to weak GMO seeds or plants with genetics that have de-evloved through degenerate selective breeding (selecting not for hardiness but yield and appearance).

Whether or not it is a conspiracy theory is a moot point. The fact is that much of today's agricultural plants can't survive in nature unassisted, which plays perfectly into the hands of the agricultural chemical suppliers. So our plants are selectively bred to need to be sprayed. Functionally whether this is a diabolical or simply stupid phenomena, in the short term, chemical strays are needed to

fend off or kill mites, bugs, diseases or other threats profitable crop yields. It gets worse, is there a routine analysis of the benefits of a particular chemical spray versus impact to human health by a grower. Is the answer that the grower never even thought about it? We think that this is the case.

"The hippy in the generation that now runs the system, the politicians, lawyers and administrators might do the right thing if they see the public actually has their back. "

AT THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

Man made chemicals are generally toxic, and should not be used at all when a natural low-toxic compound is available, which is the case in nearly 100% of the time. At the crux of the matter is the fact that chemical formulations may be branded and patented, which allows for massive profits. That is how the pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical, drug business fly. Money honey. Anything organic is the enemy. Disease resistant seed is the enemy of Monsanto. Pest resistant seed is the enemy of the pesticide manufacturers.

It is now common knowledge that chemical agents that bombard the population from every direction cause errant autoimmune responses, which in turn facilitate most every disease process and prematurely age the organs and organism. And the solution for this degeneration of the organism, is to further bombard the system with synthetic pharmaceuticals, not one but a half or full dozen drugs. This is the basis of the trillion dollar per year "medical" system.

"If they banned the sale of chemical pesticides or at least the use thereof, that could easily solve most of the problem.

California’s current “residual tolerance requirements” which is how much of specific pesticides is allowed to remain on marketable cannabis products (should not be used in the first place). So instead of banning them outright, now testing needs to be done on the production line, which involves third party testing, costs, and waiting. Depending on how regulators respond, they may create a bottleneck in the supply, or if they become overly ineffective and bureaucratic, they could drive marginal and perhaps fine cannabis operations out of business.

Now, if grow conditions are properly controlled, light, moisture, air flow, etc. fungus growth is a non issue. In curing there are natural ways to avoid fungus growth, in the same way that a wet rag will get moldy if you throw it in a dark cabinet, as opposed to a dry rag that is exposed to sunlight. Rather than adopting healthy grow properties, people add chemical nutrients, water, light, pack in as many plants as they can and then spray whatever on them to compensate for their incompetence.

One of the most contentious chemicals on California’s list is Myclobutanil, a fungicide commonly used on almonds, berries and grapes in the state. Myclobutanil is limited to .025 parts per million, based on his lab’s calculations which take into account how much an average consumer weighs and how much weed they’d be consuming per day the conservative limit for cannabis is proposed by some to be 1.5 parts per million. Then again, inhalation toxicity is very different in some cases to oral toxicity, and this is something that needs to be studied. Then again, why not nip the problem at the bud, pun intended, and ban pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that are unnatural.

"They're not going to take the simple, super cost effective approach and ban pesticides. That could lead to the people looking into food regulations." - Johnny Rod

So what they're arguing is that really stringent testing is not required in the industry, which we agree with. Not to be contradictory, you look at the LD50 of a substance on fish, mammals, and carcinogenic studies and if the substance has a low or moderate toxicity, a little bit won't hurt you. The issue is that very carcinogenic substances are being sprayed on crops, like grains, and the chemicals are incorporated into the protein, the gluten, which may account for the sudden emergence of gluten intolerance over the past forty years. Dairy intolerance came about when milk was required to be pasteurized to the point where all enzymes that allow milk to ferment naturally were destroyed.

"Acceptable pesticide levels vary depending on if the product is cannabis flower, an edible or another type of processed cannabis, and Raber said that distinguishing based on method of intake makes sense. When one eats weed, it’s metabolized and filtered by the liver, and there’s already an existing body of research on how pesticides are processed in oral consumption, he said. When weed is smoked, however, it goes straight into the bloodstream. In addition, there's no prior body of research on the topic, so it's appropriate that regulators exercise caution with requirements for cannabis flowers."- LA Weekly

The draft regulations are lowbrow. It may be difficult for cultivators to meet because most had little to no guidance on what types of pesticides to use or at what point of the growing process, There is the complication that Myclobutanil among many others that it can and will spread through soil, the groundwater and rainwater, and test positive in a grow hasn’t used any pesticide whatsoever.

“Pesticide testing makes up a very small percentage of the number of tests we do because it’s expensive and no one's requiring it yet,” - Lab President.

In a recent screen for a dozen commonly used pesticides. 77 percent of cannabis concentrates failed California’s proposed regulations. 44 weed samples obtained from 15 dispensaries throughout Southern California, found that 93 percent of them tested positive for pesticides, at high enough levels that they would have been banned in other states with legal weed.

Meanwhile, this massive make work project has toxicologists at the US-EPA is completing toxicological studies in coordination with the California Department of Pesticide regulations. All of which can be avoided altogether if chemical pesticides, fun and herbicides are banned all together.

Those that really say they want low tolerance amounts for pesticides should be in favor of zero levels. If they're not, then do a sniff test, do you smell a rat? While Zero Tolerance generally is stupid, an seen in the alcohol example, get caught with one beer and you're banned for life from driving. However, in the case of cannabis, the plant does not need chemicals to thrive, chemicals are not part of the plant's lifestyle or a habit..

The industry should make a U turn away from pesticides all together and use the vast array of natural solutions at hand. Mother nature can be helped along, as seen in companies like THC Design that uses natural pesticides, bacterias, enzymes from bacterias, nematodes, beneficial fungus — to keep weed plants healthy and disease-free Their pest-management program is 100 percent organic and consists of only natural bacterias and beneficial fungi.

“You can see how almost nobody in the industry is growing a perfectly safe product, having been in zero grows over 4,000 and 5,000 square feet that I haven’t seen banned substances.” - Industry Expert (paraphrase)

At the end of the day, the alpha men and women in the industry could sort out workable regulations for the industry, but right now, the government is dead set on ruining the industry and product with burdensome and ineffective regulations, which make no improvement on the quality of weed, or even stands to make things worse, with the net effect of throwing millions and perhaps billions of dollars down the drain.

The evidence presented here might probably scare the crap out of you. After all is said and done, the incidence of extremely contamination is somewhat rare and the outstanding of medicinal marijuana in most cases shines through, despite the toxins that might be present in your weed. With that said, it is imperative that we push to have marijuana growers produce product that is truly organic, product that truly lives up to its medical potential.

At the end of the day, your marijuana needs to pass YOUR sniff and eye test, and you want to use a dispensary that cares about the purity of YOUR weed, and you need to take personal responsibility and insist that the weed be tested for mold, bacteria, herbicides and pesticides. People with very serious issues should turn to oral and topical medications using truly organic cannabis based medicines - with their cannabinoid and terpenes intact - and with microbes filtered out.

"People need to take personal responsibility for what they smoke, rather than rely on a semi-functional government. Like a private eye, they should investigate their supplier, and share their findings with others. This action alone would go a very long way to clean up the weed situation in California." - Johnny Rodriguez

A recent glut of cheap crappy weed threatens to lower the price to the point where real, honest, organic growers can't afford to stay in business. What to do? While, within two weeks of recreational marijuana being fully legalized, Nevada ran out of marijuana for recreational use, this is not expected to happen in California.

With recreational marijuana now legal, thousands of outdoor grows are popping up everywhere, and a lot of them are a bad as the big corporate farms, spraying and using chemical fertilizers in abandon.

They raided 30 grow operations and took more than four hundred fungal spore samples. Two separate types of lab tests established elevated fungal spore levels, especially during the removal of plants from the grow operations. In several cases, upon plant removal, total spore counts increased to 50,000 spores / per cubic meter, and one sample was over HALF A MILLION spores per cubic meter. There is no doubt that some growers are poisoning their clients with mold, fungus and their toxic biological by-products." - Health and Safety Engineer

This article covers:

The ways that Moldy Pot harms your body and sabotages your health.
What kinds of Molds, Mildew, and Fungus are common in Marijuana.
How can I see if my Weed has mold or fungus in it?
How do Cannabis cultivators test Mold and Fungus?